Wednesday, 25 March 2015

A volunteer's viewpoint

We were lucky enough to have a number of heroic volunteers to help us on the hub at the MRS Conference last week - here are some observations from one of them, Nicola Scobell from TNS Global.---------------------------------------------

True to its name, this year’s MRS conference was all about making an impact and driving change. In his inspiring opening speech Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, urged delegates to consider if they were doing enough.

Motivated by this introduction, I was happy to spend the rest of the day talking to delegates about the ‘Researching a career’ project at the conference hub. What struck me immediately was the broad recognition that something needs to be done to improve the image of our industry for new recruits. The hub attracted a lot of attentionand it was very encouraging to see so many people willing to get involved and tell their stories.

In-keeping with a key theme of the conference, we asked delegates to become storytellers and tell us about their experiences of their career in research.

Stories were captured on film and drawn up as cartoons.

The variety of images captured shows how diverse our industry really is - it was great to see the story emerge over the course of the day.

The highlight of the day for me was the opportunity to speak to a wide variety of interesting people; all had different stories to tell but each shared a common passion for their job. A truly inspiring day!